The Global State of Ultra-Poverty 2017:

A global analysis of the greatest opportunities to end ultra-poverty by 2030.

Targeted interventions in 14 countries will reach 80% of the world's ultra-poor.

Larry Reed

Larry Reed, Senior Fellow at RESULTS and RESULTS Educational Fund shares the Global State of Ultra-Poverty report with MicroEnsure to continue to keep the forcus on ensuring that those living in ultra-poverty receive the targeted resources and focused attention of the global community to enable them to lift themselves out of the poverty that has trapped their families for generations.

RESULTS and RESULTS Educational Fund are both nonprofit organizations that perform cutting-edge research and oversight; education and mobilization of the public, policy makers and the media to support powerful citizenship to push for specific policies and legislation to address poverty.

To understand more about the report and what it provides please see the below communication from Larry Reed:

After the most recent Microcredit Summit in 2016 we decided to stop focusing on Summits every year, and instead focus on our bigger mission of providing pathways out of extreme poverty. The Global State of Ultra-Poverty (www.ultra-poverty.org), is the first public good to come out of that change of focus.

We developed the Global State of Ultra-Poverty (GSUP), to help accelerate the end of ultra-poverty, and thereby meet the Global Goal of ending poverty in all its forms, everywhere by 2030. The GSUP offers a dynamic interactive web platform that provides world-class data, expert analysis and insight, and multi-sector calls to action to highlight the action needed to eradicate ultra-poverty around the world.

So what is ultra-poverty? It is deprivation and marginalization at its worst. As Sir Fazle Abed puts it in the GSUP, - "The face of ultra-poverty is a woman, with children. She has domestic work or very low paid agricultural work and doesn't get paid properly, receiving only food for her work. She shares her food with her children, so she's half fed and they are half fed. She can never build up a surplus or send her children to school, so at age seven or eight she farms her children out to work as domestics in other homes. She also loses most of her kinship relationships because her family wants to avoid her. She's in a trap and doesn't know what to do."

And why are we asking the global development community to focus on this aspect of poverty? Because, if we don't start focusing on the hardest cases now, we will never reach the goal of the UN and the World Bank to end extreme poverty by 2030.

The GSUP offers (1) a standardized definition of ultra-poverty for sector-wide use along with a data-driven analysis of what comprises ultra-poverty; (2) a global analysis of where it is concentrated, (3) a unique synthetic index that analyzes specific country prospects for ending ultra-poverty; (4) a list of the most promising multi-sector actions to end ultra-poverty. You can read the full Global State of Ultra-Poverty report here: http://bit.ly/2yJsbgK

The Global State of Ultra Poverty

Some highlights of this report:

394 million people worldwide live in ultra-poverty, or about half of the people living in what the World Bank defines as Extreme Poverty ($1.90 per day or less).
Of the 56 countries that have 1% or more of their population living in ultra-poverty, 14 high burden countries have 8 million people and/or 40% of their population living in ultra-poverty.
Those 14 countries contain 80% of the people living in ultra-poverty worldwide, yet receive only 20% of official development assistance.

Moving forward, it is our intention that the GSUP will serve to galvanize public, social, and private sector actors to act urgently to direct resources, move policy, and prioritize the ultra-poor in the global movement to end extreme poverty by leveraging the data and analysis provided by the GSUP. It is also our intention that the GSUP will be a tool and a resource for all of our partners and the wider community of practice, and that you will be active contributors and partners in building its robustness.

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